Mannequin
by UltimateParadox
Summary: I don't want to be in the dark anymore! Kurogane, Tomoyo, twins, AU, oneshot. For GreenAppleIce.


**A/N: Heeey guys. This oneshot is very special and dedicated to someone super-special-awesome. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, GREENAPPLEICE-SAMA-DONO-TAN-CHAN.**

**Rated PG-15**

**Horror/Family**

**This will also be posted in two places: as a stand alone and in my 200 Tsubasa oneshot anthology as memory 5: **

**Mannequin**

**I. Fracture**

Kurogane stared. He hadn't meant to do that. The doll lay in two parts on the uneven floorboards. The entire attic was covered in a film of dust, but the jostled, broken figure jarred the particles into the air, creating an almost eerie aura around it. Its head had broken clear off, shedding dust off its gold-spun threads of hair and cracking the porcelain between its blue, gemstone eyes. They stared back at him, cold, lifeless, _accusing_.

"Shit," Kurogane growled. He scooped the parts up and settled them back onto the old side table it had been knocked from. After a moment's thought, he turned the little head to face away from him.

"Kurogane, did you find them?" Tomoyo's voice drifted up from the drawn ladder.

"Uh," Kurogane looked around, eying a little red jewelry box. He lifted the box's lid and saw the pearl earrings Tomoyo desired. "Yeah, I found 'em."

From Tomoyo's pleased squeal, Kurogane concluded that she owed him one and wondered when he should collect on it.

**II. Vermilion**

That night, Kurogane woke to giggling. His red eyes snapped open and he shot up in his bed. The digital clock's red digits told him the time ("3:01? That is bullshit!"), cloaking the rest of the room in a faint crimson shade. "A dream?"

He relaxed back into the sheets, letting his head thud against the pillow. With an aggravated sigh, he brought his heavy lids to a close.

There was silence, then, _"Where is he? Why is it so dark? I don't want to be in the dark anymore!"_ a rushed, panicked whisper reverberated in Kurogane's ears and sent a chill racing down his spine. He turned his head in the direction of the whisper, his senses sharp and his muscles tense.

To his credit, Kurogane didn't scream. He didn't react at all, in fact, so stunned by the fearsome sight.

To the right of his pillow, standing besides his bed, the child looked like a rejected Hollywood humanoid creature. Its hair, pale and long, tangled and matted, hung over its face like a demented sheet, only its white nose peeking through the curtain. Though Kurogane couldn't see its eyes, he felt them on his face.

_"Who are you? Why does it hurt?"_ The child gasped, shakily raising broken, bleeding hands to its hair, staining that mess red.

And then it was gone.

Kurogane did not find sleep that night.

**III. Splinters**

"What is going on? There's a reason I made you come up here instead of me yesterday, it's so dusty!" Tomoyo complained, stepping over a displaced box of _something_.

"Quit whining, your majesty," Kurogane sneered, eyes peeled for the tiny table and the tinier doll. It was a sleep-deprived hunch, but hours lying awake in thought - and oh, how his mind had been tossed as though in tempest - supplied him with a foolish, horrifying theory. It went against nature, it went against life, but then again, was this also the same for what had called to him in the night?

There! Kurogane saw the little doll, saw its body standing erect and its head by its feet, just as he had left it. Even the head was turned away, exactly the same.

"Why am I up here, Kurogane? I should be working on my designs. The deadline's creeping up, you know."

Kurogane ignored his sister, deciding never to tell her that because of his cracked theory, he was very much against venturing into the stale-aired attic alone. Gingerly, he picked up the pieces and touched the broken ends together. Maybe glue?

Tomoyo's hand on his shoulder startled him. "Hey, isn't that one of Grandma's dolls?"

Kurogane didn't know and told her such. He'd never seen the thing before in his life. "You know about it, then?"

She nodded. "A little. Mom said that Grandma brought the set home with her from her trip to the Valerian Ruins. Said the two were expensive and hard to find, modeled after real people."

"...that's _creepy_."

"You know what's creepier? They only made dolls out of people who died in the massacre. Maybe as a holy thing? Rememberance?"

Kurogane didn't know if she was joking, didn't really care, but it wasn't until he placed the broken doll next to his digital clock that he realized something. "They came as a set?"

A haunted whisper shook free to the surface of his memory. _"Where is he?"_

**IV. Rewind**

Kurogane stayed awake that night, back pressed to the headboard, waiting. The red digits illuminated the edges of the doll, casting it in a crimson glow. He waited, waited...

He was unconsciously drifting off to sleep when a chill and barely-there weight settled against his arm. Stiffly, he pivoted his head to the side, less surprised to see the mangy child there, sitting complacently on the mattress. One bloody, frozen hand rested against his own.

_"It's not dark anymore, just red. Thank you. But where is he?"_

"Who is he?" Kurogane asked, voice hushed and gravelly. He kept a close watch on the child's hand, the touch slick. Every instinct hammered him into withdrawing, running from the covers like a scared little bitch, yet he remained in the bed beyond rhyme and reason.

The question seemed to fall on deaf ears for a long moment. Then the child raised its wrecked hands back up to that entanglement of hair, curled those fingers into fists, and pressed them to the approximate location of its eye sockets. _"Why does it have to hurt? What did we do to deserve this? Where's my brother? Where's Fai?"_

And then, it disappeared. With the dreaded, gut-sinking feeling of déjà vu, Kurogane stared at his hand. Not a spattering of blood blemished his skin.

**V. Affection**

"Deadlines, Kurogane, deadlines!"

"Just look for the other doll, Tomoyo!" Kurogane raged as he dug through the various contents of a re-used hat box - one of many, many hat boxes that he could never hope to explain away.

Tomoyo slammed shut the drawer of the dresser she had been rifling through, throwing a collection of mothballs to the floor. "Are you okay? Seriously? You're so grumpy! Have you been getting enough sleep lately?"

"No, no I haven't," Kurogane spat, slamming the lid onto the box and reaching for another. Where was the other doll?

"Take a nap!" Tomoyo cried, surprised, perhaps in response to his unexpected admission.

Kurogane made some strange, bestial noise in his throat. "No! I need to find that doll first!" There was as much reason for shouting as there was to even suspect the dolls. "It's important and I won't sleep until its found!"

"Youou Kurogane!"

The name gave him sudden pause, his addled mind taking a moment to register his rarely used given name - no one called him that, ever, and that was when he realized Tomoyo meant business. Her eyes were hard on him, lips sealed into a tight line. She looked as cold in spirit as the ragged child did in aesthetics.

"Kurogane," she hissed, tone heavy with that one overpowering thing that displayed the hierarchy between legal guardian and charge, between older and younger siblings, but never between two friends as they often associated themselves. "You say this doll is important, well, here's a reality check for you. We're all we've got now, and you are what's important to me."

"Tomoyo?"

She pointed a lilac-painted fingernail at the open entrance. "Go take a nap. Sleep. Feel better. Don't worry, I'll keep looking."

Kurogane, humbled, asked, "What about your designs?"

Tomoyo's grim expression faded to something softer, motherly, and it was weird because the resemblance to their own was stunning. "Go to sleep, Kurogane."

And he did.

**VI. Hook, Line, Sinker**

When he woke up again, the sun was just sinking over the horizon, filtering his room through a fiery pallet. Kurogane went to check the time and saw two dolls, one dusty and the other broken, resting like old tin soldiers, dutifully, by his clock, glowing with the artificial light.

He reached out for the whole doll, nearly jumped out of his skin when tiny fingers, cold like ice, clutched his wrist. Kurogane's eyes traveled high and was met with not one, but two, identical, ragged, hair-hidden children.

"Shit," he cursed. "This is crazy."

_"You found him,"_ crooned one, farther back than its twin. _"You found him, you found him!" _The whispers were quick, but held an elation Kurogane had never before heard. Suddenly, their skin looked less gray, warmer, and they were less frightening. A sudden humming in his veins alerted him to a feeling he'd only ever felt towards Tomoyo, a feeling so agonizingly fraternal.

These twins, these toys, what the hell? What were they? Cursed Valerian dolls, here to reap his head?

His wrist was released. _"Yuui,"_ his former captive soothed. _"Why do you hurt?"_

_"Fai, it's because of what Mama and Papa did."_

_"We didn't survive, Yuui."_

_"No, we were left alone in the dark."_

_"But Yuui, he found us. Your doll broke, but he brought us out of the dark."_

The child that had grabbed him, Fai, raised its tiny hands and separated the curtain of its brother's hair. Kurogane almost screamed again, so unused to anything so horrible. Fai had exposed the empty, bleeding socket of Yuui's left eye, a congealed mass of agony, a hole to oblivion.

Eyeless, Yuui reached out to do the same to Fai. Kurogane swallowed back his vomit, chest lurching forward on the heave. Where Yuui had a gouged out eye, Fai's bottom jaw was absent, raining blood, tongue, and saliva onto his carpet.

_"The hook hurt your mouth, Fai."_

_"The hook hurt your eye, Yuui."_

As one, the twins turned to regard Kurogane, their poor victim unable to tear his eyes from the macabre, blond, blue-eyed twins. _"Kuro-sama broke the seal,"_ Yuui said on the ghost of a breath. _"We're free now."_

_"It doesn't hurt anymore."_

They waved their bloody hands and smiled (however Fai did it, it was a spectacular feat), and Kurogane watched as the red substance began to dissolve away, watched muscle and tendons sew themselves together as time raced to restore the twins. It was then that Kurogane felt an overwhelming sleepiness. He was asleep before he knew it.

**VII. New**

His alarm rang out shrilly and, in Kurogane's most-definitely-biased opinion, unjustly. He was just so tired...

He reached out for the alarm and felt something soft instead. Kurogane looked up and saw his fingers on golden thread, signifying the hair of two perfectly in tact Valerian funeral dolls.

* * *

**Even in other worlds, Kurogane's there to lead Fai/Yuui out of the dark, huh? Review, review, por favor.**


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